Sigrid Kunig
Physical Description Sigrid is unusually tall for a woman, and typically Nordic in appearance, being pale skinned, with very long blond hair and blue eyes. She’s equally comfortable in masculine and feminine clothing, and in her downtime will often opt for the most comfortable option. Hobbies and Personality She is generally affable, usually unfazed by most spy-related or similar situations (explosions, etc.), but completely naive when it comes to many mainstream social norms (such as not being aware that referring to a brand new agent’s obscure childhood events because you’ve read their file might be somewhat disturbing.) She has very little practical understanding of life ‘outside’, as it were, from any other angle than one of anthropological curiosity. ‘Normal people’ are something like zoo animals to her, especially early on, and while she is adept at undercover work and understands societal workings from an outsider's perspective, she is badly thrown by the occasional appearance of relics outside society among her peers. In her spare time she keeps terrariums, mainly of plants native to the areas around Drudenschloss, (though one of these is actually a large vivarium inhabited by alpine salamanders, which all have names and which she claims to be able to tell apart), and enjoys poetry. Sigrid largely avoids adventure novels as she finds the majority of them to be ridiculously improbable, and all attempts at reading one usually end with the book being thrown at the wall or out of the nearest window. The one exemption is for her colleague and friend Lori Fontaine's penny dreadfuls, as she recognizes those for the satire they are, and finds them enormously amusing, if somewhat bizarre. Family and Relationships Grandfather Dominik Eschmann was a member of the Swiss Intelligence during the Napoleonic wars (also the last generation of spies before the organization went international). When he and another went, pursued, through Trondheim on their way to Svalbard, Mathias and Petra Kunig aided their escape, first by concealing them in their house, then by using familial resources to get them safely to the northern coast of mainland Norway. They remained good friends after the war. His daughter Sonja and the Kunig's son Artur, met when Sonja was seven, and decided immediately that they were going to marry when they had grown up. Later, at age fourteen, Sonja travelled alone from her parent's farm in Canton Zürich to Drudenschloss in Canton Graubünden, in a bid to be allowed to follow in her father's footsteps. She was grudgingly allowed to begin training (on the condition that she not begin actual work until she reached the age of eighteen) and was joined a few months after her arrival by Etienne de la Roche (who would quickly become like a brother to her), and they began training together, both joining the organization as active members four years later. Upon finishing his medical studies, Artur and Sonja were married and the former relocated to Switzerland to become the organization's resident physician. They subsequently managed to not only produce Sigrid, but also her two older siblings, Marcus (b.1838) and Anette (b.1845), and three younger siblings, Nils (b. 1849), Mara (b.1850), and Elsa (b.1853). The Kunig family as a whole is rather odd - wealthy aristocrats for many generations, at some point the family decided that the most effective way to manage their collective boredom was to take up eccentricity as a hobby...while still seeming respectable, (and boring) to the rest of conservative Norwegian society. Thus, they essentially have a family-wide competition to see who can be the most eccentric and Sigrid in this context actually rates as one of the most boring - Uncle Svend being the current undisputed winner, due to his obsession with the trolls native to Scandinavian folklore. However, as a result of the way the Kunig family functions, they are a rather insular group, and family members tend to share Sigrid’s two settings for interacting with others - ‘family/friend’ and ‘Society’, with no real concept of there being a grey area in between. Sigrid calls both Etienne de La Roche and Sebastian Webb 'Uncle', in spite of the fact that neither of them is in actuality a blood relation. Sigrid tends to gravitate towards the odder members of the Ministry for friendship - she is one of the few who are not at all frightened of Zofia, and in fact the two seem to be something like friends (being near in age, and both being some of the most senior of the young spies.) She is good friends with Cateryn, Lori, and Svetlana in particular, though she is also enormously amused by the majority of Francois' pranks. Her taste in friends is very similar to her Uncle Etienne's, and the only spy she outright does not get along with is Sorin Dragomir, due to an unpleasant and rather vicious argument early on in their acquaintance. Job and Weapons Job: Cryptographer and full field agent Gun preference: none in particular Other Weapon Preference: Primary weapons are a pair of long daggers, but she also carries a pair of revolvers and some other assorted weaponry chosen according to appropriateness for her current mission. Her mother and grandfather had her learn to use a Swiss halberd, for the sake of tradition, in spite of it generally being a rather useless weapon for a female spy, not being easily concealed. Backstory Of her parents’ children she was the only one to show any real inclination towards joining the ‘family business’, and so her mother and grandfather began to train her from an early age. The manner of her early socialization leaves her with a psyche which is nearly immune to most of the stresses of spy work, but this also means that she is unable to relate to most of normal society in any meaningful way, which becomes an issue when she simply assumes that people she considers friends or family share her worldview. Sigrid's training in cryptography was informal for the most part, being self taught partly due to interest but largely due to the presence of extremely obnoxious, nosy cousin Edvard who had a tendency to read people’s journals and personal letters, and also had a strong in interest in codes and ciphers. Thus her training mainly was the result of needing to construct ever-more difficult codes in the interest of staying ahead of cousin Edvard’s code-breaking skills. Eventually she succeeded in outmatching him. Also, she filled his shoes with frog spawn as an act of retaliation. (They eventually called a truce.) Due to her extensive early training and previous acquaintance with the work of the Ministry (then still regularly referred to as the Corvi or the Ravens), Sigrid was accepted into the organization at the age of eighteen, in 1864. Related Articles *The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Related Links * Outside the wiki links go here. Category:Original Characters